Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [167]
For years no one would speak comfortably about what had happened that night, or how. Lloyd Mustin was among the first to suspect it. He saw it as it was happening in a blinding incandescent flash of nitrocellulose powder. This “illuminated the firing ship brilliantly and unmistakably,” Mustin said. “It was as easy to recognize the San Francisco in the flash of her own guns as it would have been at high noon in San Francisco Harbor.”
Norman Scott and his staff and so many men had been cut down by Callaghan’s flagship, which was, it seems, firing on an enemy target beyond the Atlanta. Scott had learned in the Battle of Cape Esperance what happens when ships get caught between friends and enemies at night and lose track of each other with no ready means of identification. Visibility was poor owing to the heavy smoke. Flames and the flashes of muzzles constricted the pupils.
According to a San Francisco signalman, Vic Gibson, watching from the signal bridge, the Atlanta was caught in a crossfire. “We were firing at such close range that the shells leaving our guns were going right through the superstructure of the Atlanta and the Jap shells were doing the same from their direction.” In the confusion, the San Francisco had simply lost track of her. “Probably she drifted into our line of fire—an almost perfectly flat trajectory at that range,” Lieutenant Commander Bruce McCandless wrote. “Perhaps something like that was inevitable in the wild, free-swinging brawl that resulted when the two formations merged.”
The best evidence of whose shells hit her lay spattered around the Atlanta’s boat deck: a mess of green dye powder, the telltale color that Callaghan’s flagship used to aid in spotting her shell splashes. Mustin found that another salvo from the San Francisco had struck the port side five-inch waist mount, still trained forward from its engagement with Abe’s lead destroyers. That salvo penetrated the mount from left to right, smashing the breech, slicing one of the guns away, and killing nearly everybody inside. The back was blown loose. It stood leaning against the superstructure. There was no doubt these were eight-inch shells. “You could measure them with a ruler,” Mustin said. The only other ship firing eight-inch ordnance that night was the Portland, but her dye loads were orange. In the Atlanta, from behind the hatchway that led forward from his damage-control station, Bill McKinney, the electrician’s mate, heard banging and shouting. Men were saying that their belowdecks compartment had been breached, that flames were visible, and that blood was running down into it. They needed to get out fast. “I continued to try our phones without success,” McKinney wrote. “Our very large compartment was a factor in the ship’s buoyancy, and I did not dare open the watertight door forward. I did take a peek through the escape scuttle in the large double hatch covering above and leading to the sick bay passageway immediately above us. The space above was full of thick, yellow smoke.”
Donning a rescue breather, McKinney left through the topside hatch and, joined by a sailor named Daniel Curtin, climbed the ladder into the scuttle above. “The smoke was so thick that the beam of our battle lantern did not extend for more than two feet. We stumbled over the body of the sailor who had been coughing and choking earlier. I wondered if we could have saved him.”
AS THE BATTLE LOST coherence in the minds of its participants, an order came over the TBS that left Laurance DuBose in the Portland, his gunnery officer, Commander Elliott Shanklin, and every turret officer and gun captain mistrustful of their own ears: “Cease firing own ships. Cease firing own ships.